There is a continually increasing number of terminals in use today, such as mobile telephones, PDAs with wireless communication capabilities, personal computers, self service kiosks and two-way pagers. Software applications which run on these terminals increase their utility. For example, a mobile phone may include an application which retrieves the weather for a range of cities, or a PDA may include an application that allows a user to shop for groceries. These software applications take advantage of the connectivity to a network in order to provide timely and useful services to users. However, due to the restricted resources of some terminals, and the complexity of delivering large amounts of data for processing to the terminals, developing and maintaining data processing capabilities of software applications remains a difficult and time-consuming task.
The current state of art for over-the-air (OTA) provisioning typically consists of a rigid set of operations that are suited to deliver a fixed content type. The runtime environment on the terminal is designed to handle a limited set of predefined content types and incapable of any content-adaptive or customized provisioning by the content provider or publisher. The conventional provisioning process is typically carried out by software that contains certain knowledge of the downloaded content and the installation steps. Due to this built-in knowledge, the content provider and device user are left with an inflexible “one size fits all” model. The limitations of this approach can include: an inability to handle arbitrary content; an inability to dynamically extend existing applications with new features; and an inability to provide customized provisioning capabilities based on content type and/or requirements.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a system and method of adaptable provisioning of generic application content to obviate or mitigate at least some of the above presented disadvantages.